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Dodging mines and interrogating the enemy: One man’s story of the Vietnam War
With Vietnam Veteran’s Day held on Sunday, August 18, journalist Monique Preston caught up with veteran Jeff Swain to chat about his experiences.
Jeff Swain can clearly remember the day man landed on the moon.
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It was July 1969, and while most Australians were glued to their black and white televisions, he was “laying in the dirt in the jungle in Vietnam” looking at the moon.
Other men around him had earbuds in listening to the historic occasion.
It was also the day immortalised by the band Redgum with the lyrics “And Frankie kicked a mine, the day that mankind kicked the moon” in the song I was only 19.
While he was not right where Jeff was, ‘Frankie’ was part of the same operation Jeff was involved in that day and was only kilometres away.
Both were in 6th battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment. ‘Frankie’ was in A Company and Jeff was in D Company.
It was only the second operation Jeff had been part of.
“The battalion’s mission was to protect the rice harvest from the Viet Cong around Dat Do village, which was known to be an ‘enemy sympathising village’,” Jeff said.
“There were a lot of mines. That was intense.”
Mines were a problem during Jeff’s time while serving in the Australian Army in Vietnam from May 1969 to May 1970, and he remembers a couple of near-misses.
Once he was involved in doing a resupply to a South Vietnamese army fort near the village of Hoi My with other soldiers.
They had been up and back the same 100m track twice, but Jeff and two others sat out the third trip out because there were not enough supplies for all of them to carry that time.
One of the other Australians stepped on a mine on the track on that third trip. One was killed and two others injured.
“It was the lotto you didn’t want to win,” Jeff said.
“You think how close I was to treading on it four times.
“It makes you think.”
On another occasion, he was following a trail and tripped on a discarded mine on the outskirts of Dat Do village.
Luckily for Jeff, it had been discarded by the fleeing enemy in long grass and the safety pin was still in it.
On yet another occasion he put his pack down and smoke started to come out from below it.
Jeff had put it on a mine he says was probably left over from the 1950s. It was only smoking, and didn’t blow up.
“I was kissed by a fairy when I was born,” he said.
Jeff, who now lives at Highlands — about 30 minutes from Seymour — joined the Australian Army as a regular soldier on January 18, 1968 at the age of 19.
By May the following year, he was at war in Vietnam as part of Delta Company 6RAR.
While he was also a soldier taking part in day-to-day activities such as patrols and ambushes, Jeff also had a different role to most of his fellow soldiers.
Having studied French and Latin at school, he had a propensity towards learning new languages.
As such, he trained as an interpreter before leaving Australia, doing a three-month intensive colloquial Vietnamese course.
Learning all day every day, and into the night, Jeff joked that “after a few weeks I was dreaming in Vietnamese”.
With about four or five intelligence representatives in his unit, his role was to take part in the initial interrogation of any prisoners the company took.
“I would interrogate the prisoners — (asking) what’s your job, where are you going, where’s your mates?” he said.
“One of my jobs was to identify if they (the prisoners) were more important than they let on.”
If they were believed to be important members of the Viet Cong, they would be taken away for further interrogation by more senior intelligence people.
Jeff would also go through any documents the Australians found and immediately pass on any information useful to his superiors.
Other times he would talk to villagers and would have to judge if they were telling the truth.
Among the “tricks of the trade” was the use of some words that had a different meaning to the North Vietnamese than South Vietnamese. Jeff would try to trip up people by using them in the North Vietnamese way.
He would also talk to the children because when they then asked the adults a question, he could listen to how the adults answered.
However, his motto was to “take everything with a grain of salt”.
“You had to assume nothing, trust no-one, and check everything,” he said.
One of the standout moments for Jeff during his time in Vietnam was being there during the placing of the Long Tan Cross on the battlefield at Long Tan on August 18, 1969 — three years after the battle took place.
“We were able to walk around and you could still smell the battlefield,” Jeff said.
The troops went in the night before the memorial service, and watched as the cross was delivered by helicopter the next morning.
They held a commemorative service, and “then it was back to war”.
“The whole battalion was there,” Jeff said.
“Everyone was on tenterhooks about whether the others (the Viet Cong) knew we were there.”
For Christmas in 1969, Jeff was part of an operation in the Nui May Tao Mountains on the boundary of several provinces.
The Viet Cong had a logistics camp there, and it was the job of the battalion to clear them out.
“The platoons in Delta Company found a lot of medical supplies, so that was really significant,” he said.
Jeff said his time in Vietnam mainly involved patrols and ambushes.
In the final two months of his time there, Jeff left Delta Company and rejoined the intelligence section in the battalion headquarters, and spent his last operation in the fire support base.
His work there included monitoring radios and extracting the intelligence information for map-marking and recording in the intelligence logbooks.
At the end of his tour, Jeff volunteered to go back to Vietnam in 1971 as part of the Special Air Service Regiment.
“I was happy to. I was a professional soldier,” he said.
While he was accepted to the SAS and joined 2 Squadron in New Guinea, he went on to officer training in January 1971 instead of going back to Vietnam with the SAS.
Starting as a private in the Australian Army, Jeff worked his way up to the rank of major by the time he transferred to the Army Reserve in 1993.
He finished with the Army Reserve effectively at the end of 2000.
He also spent 15 years as a Department of Defence public servant time after his army career ended, managing battlefield simulation sites in support of advanced combat training for officers.
He also sent time as a civilian contractor working for the Department of Defence helping to train soldiers doing the same job in Darwin in 1998 and 1999.
During that time, the East Timor crisis began, and his focus shifted from research for “something that might happen in 30 or 40 years’ time” to focusing on preparations for the East Timor crisis.
Jeff, who is now the Goulburn Valley Vietnam Veterans’ Association vice-president, said he never regretted joining the Australian Army.
“If I were to describe it, I would say it was interesting,” he said.
“I enjoyed my army service.
“And I was fortunate not to be killed or injured.”
Senior Journalist